At their 25th anniversary celebration in New York City's West Village a couple weeks ago, a surprise awaited the mainstream environmental organization - the Rainforest Action Network (RAN). Their event was hosted by Sex and the City star Chris Noth, who played Mr. Big in both the long-running TV show and recent hit films. Just as Mr. Big was meeting and greeting in front of the gala to benefit RAN, a black car pulled up and out swaggered another Mr. Big and two striking-looking activists playing his charming costars, Samantha and Carrie.

Bearing signs and dressed to the nines, the sudden arrivals strutted in front of the entrance and proclaimed their (satirical) support for the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). The FSC has brought its members discredit for its 'certification' of industrial logging operations in old growth forests and of plantations that have replaced those forests as 'well-managed'. RAN's support for this organization has come under fire by activists around the world. Monica Hunken, playing Samantha, exclaimed gleeful approval for RAN's ongoing membership in, and promotion of, FSC certification standards: "When I sip my frappuccino on the High Line [link to http://www.thevillager.com/villager_323/rainforestactivists.html

], (a park in Manhattan), there is nothing better than feeling some nice old growth wood under my delicate behind!" (In New York City, park benches and boardwalks are made from FSC-certified wood logged from trees deep inside once-intact rainforests in the Amazon, West Africa and Southeast Asia.) The other Mr. Big bragged, “My wood is certified.”

Studies have shown that once there’s an incursion into an intact rainforest, illegal logging, cattle ranching, or plantations quickly follow. The plantations are generally guarded by armed sentries and their monocultures of trees fed with vast amounts of water and pesticides to maintain their productivity, often for paper or palm oil. There exists significant documentation of armed guards committing human rights abuses, including the murder of the indigenous forest dwellers who were displaced.

Old growth forests are not only the most bio-diverse ecosystems on land (akin to coral reefs in the oceans), they are essential to life itself. The world's intact tropical rainforests, over 50 million years old and continuing to evolve in their complexity, have been described as the "lungs of the earth". These ancient and vanishing places exhale fresh water and oxygen; they drive air currents, regulate rainfall, and help cool the planet. These trees hold immense stores of carbon dioxide which, as they are released, hasten and exacerbate our climate crisis at an alarming rate; their preservation is considered by scientists and economists alike as critical to addressing climate change, and at low cost.

RAN's Forest Campaign Director Lafcadio Cortesi emerged from the gala event to disarm the theatrical demonstration. He made the same claims that mainstream supporters of market-based environmentalism have been making during years of rising outrage. He claimed that if RAN were to pull out of FSC, as the activists urged, any safeguards against destructive practices would be further weakened, and RAN would lose their voice in this discussion. He argued for the ‘less bad’ versus the ‘truly bad.’ And he stated that FSC did not certify the destruction of an intact forest to turn it into an FSC plantation, although he had nothing to say about the environmental devastation and irreparable damage to human rights that these FSC plantations yield.

Grassroots activist and founder of the New York Climate Action Group JK Canepa answered Cortesi's defensive rationales for maintaining membership in the FSC without publicly decrying the very outrage he claimed to wish to change: FSC’s criteria allowing logging of old-growth. JK asked RAN: "What have you accomplished in the eighteen months since you acknowledged grave concerns about the FSC and claimed you were reviewing your membership? It’s time for you to leave, and to do so publicly. Your reputation and influence would help build the campaign to outlaw all industrial logging of old growth forests.”

Cortesi modestly demurred, saying that RAN was not that influential. He then explained RAN's belief system: protesting, getting arrested, and standing outside the system don't work. He should know, he stated, as he’d already tried all those strategies. He told NYCAG that if you enter into the marketplace as RAN has, you have to negotiate with the logging companies. Yet RAN's mission is to campaign “for the forests, their inhabitants and the natural systems that sustain life by transforming the global marketplace through education, grassroots organizing, and non-violent direct action.” Where in this vision did RAN intend to sit in corporate boardrooms making concessions to logging companies to make things “less bad”?!

Activists explained that advocating for market-based "solutions" to environmental destruction and allowing corporations to comply voluntarily with rules for protection have not worked. It might allow mainstream groups like RAN to feel better about doing something and also allow them to continue to tap into corporate foundation money, but what is needed are mandatory rules that forbid destructive behavior. On this, RAN’s twenty-fifth anniversary, the people standing outside the exclusive party, reaching out to the public and to the celebrants, ask that RAN reject the behavior of the greenwashing organizations it lambasts, such as the Environmental Defense Fund, and return to its roots.

Meanwhile, as Cortesi was explaining the miracle of commodity markets for 'forest products', Noth came out to engage some of the protesters and listened to some well-made points, and Mike Roselle, co-founder of Earth First!, creator of the Ruckus Society, and currently a board member of RAN, also emerged from the fundraiser. Roselle told the environmentalists that they were doing the right thing and to keep it up!

Great action, we have to keep the pressure not only on electeds and corporations but so-called green groups, RAN is of the better ilk whihc makes it bizarre that thye are still supporting the Forest Stewardship Council.

See a good book at:

The Struggle for Land and The Fate of The Forests Edited by Marcus Colchester & Larry Lohman The World Rainforest Movement and with ZED Books ISBN: 1-85649-13900 (Hb.) 1-85649-140-4(Pb.) 402 pages, 14x21.5cm

Deforestation, they tell us, is caused by 'poverty', 'over-population' and 'under-development'. The solutions are therefore obvious-fewer people and more development. This book challenges these assumptions. Deforestation, it argues, is an expression of structural inequalities within tropical countries and in their relations with the industrial North. Throwing aid money into the development pot will only accelerate forest loss if these structural issues are not simultaneously addressed. Based on six country studies from Latin America, Asia and Africa to illustrate the real complexity of the problem and the diversity of situations that exist, this book shows how land concentration, land speculation and landlessness are the main causes of improvident land use. Poor people, denied land and livelihood, are being forced into the forests in ever increasing numbers for sheer survival, often encouraged by government and development agency funding. Meanwhile the lands they have been forced to abandon are turned over to agribusiness producing cash crops for export.

Agrarian reform must be moved to the top of the global agenda. Without land and food security, rural communities will become increasingly destabilised and impoverished and vulnerable ecosystems will be destroyed. Local people must be allowed to regain control over their land and their economies, and Third World debt cancelled.

For the record, I am no longer on the RAN board, not that this has anything to do with the FSC. I have expressed my view that the FSC has outlived it usefulness. My biggest concern is that it isn’t, and can never be a true “third party”. Combining the first party with a second party does not produce a third party. A true third party would not have either conservationists nor timber industry representatives in it, but be composed only of non affiliated scientists. And by scientists, I mean to exclude forestry, which is not and has never been a science. But I must say that this issue is more complex than it is being represented here, and this is a policy dispute, and in no way do I believe that RAN has compromised its values. And, in the interests of full disclosure, I was the author of the FSC’s 10 point sustainability requirements, which the FSC pays only lip service to today.

After the people in the United States cut down and paved over their own forest now they want to tell people in developing countries they can't follow the same model of development? It's green imperialism is what it is. Clean up your own oil spill in the Gulf before you tell anyone else what to do with their own natural resources.

I think it is clear that people in all those countries are working to STOP the deforestation, so it is actually solidarity that is occurring, but maybe you have other suggestions or examples of ways in which you are engaged now in actions that help, if so please share! Always open to learning and thanks.

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